An investigation into Viking skeletons reveals a hidden story of violence, energy, and the stunning variations between neighboring Viking societies.
These bones got here from throughout Norway—from the north, and from the Oslo Fjord area—and a stunning variety of them confirmed proof of brutal deaths.
Some had skulls crushed by blunt drive. Others have been slashed within the again or leg with swords. Just a few had arrowheads nonetheless embedded of their bones.
“There was a number of violence within the comparatively few human stays that we needed to study,” says Lisa Strand, an osteologist whose evaluation of the Viking stays was a part of her PhD research on the Norwegian College of Science and Expertise.
All advised, almost 40% of the Viking stays she checked out confirmed proof of a violent dying.
As Strand and a small group of researchers would uncover, these Viking bones weren’t simply from unfortunate people, they have been a part of a sample.
And a key piece of the puzzle was that they have been Vikings from the place we now name Norway.
In a brand new episode of 63 Levels North, Strand and her collaborators speak about how they got here to grasp the importance of the violence she recorded:
Everybody is aware of that Vikings are violent, proper? The identify itself comes from the Outdated Norse phrase víkingr which implies pirate or raider. However have been all Vikings equally violent?
Previous research (to which Strand was a contributor) confirmed that Vikings moved to and settled throughout larger Europe. Danish Vikings moved to England, Swedish Vikings infiltrated the Baltic; Norwegians moved to Eire, Iceland, and Greenland. Much more stunning was that a few of these Vikings weren’t even Scandinavians.
So… have been all Vikings equally violent?
Or maybe Vikings weren’t a monolithic group of marauding warriors as was beforehand believed?
Viking bones, the researchers realized, have been solely part of the proof they wanted to grasp Viking violence.
What they wanted was to determine what formed Viking societies, and the way these forces could have formed how—and why—folks died.
In order that they determined to look throughout the North Sea, at Viking deaths in Denmark. And probably the most stunning clues they discovered concerned not solely what number of of those Vikings had died violent deaths, however exactly how they died.
Almost all the Danish Vikings had been executed by having their heads lower off.
That’s not one thing you do in battle, Strand says.
“It’s fairly time consuming to decapitate somebody, even in case you are in a battle. You don’t take time to chop their head off. No, no. It’s fairly grim, but it surely’s true,” she says on the podcast.
This was a vital clue, as a result of it suggests that there have been folks in Denmark, individuals who have been a powerful leaders, who had sufficient energy to order an execution.
“The truth that in Denmark, we’re seeing principally executions, factors to the thought of a extra centralized authority,” says David Jacobson, a sociologist from the College of South Florida who was a part of the analysis staff.
Among the many iconic artifacts from the Norwegian Viking age are the Viking ships from the Museum of the Viking Age.
Jan Invoice, an archaeologist and curator of the ship assortment, has studied the Gokstad ship intimately, together with attempting to be taught extra in regards to the man who was buried on this lovely ship. He was additionally one among Strand’s PhD supervisors.
“So we’ve a person apparently lifeless in battle and we’ve this magnificent grave, which extremely signifies that he was on very prime degree society, a king or one thing like that,” Invoice says.
However finds just like the Gokstad ship are comparatively uncommon.
As an alternative, Invoice, now working with Jacobson to higher perceive the violence that the researchers had documented, realized they wanted different info.
There was loads of proof to be present in each nations.
The Viking sword is the handgun of the Viking age, since you couldn’t actually use it for the rest than killing different folks, or threatening to kill them.
“We noticed that in each locations there have been burials with weapons, however the proportions have been very totally different. Whereas in Norway, it’s a really, quite common factor that males have weapons within the burials, in Denmark, solely a small a part of the burials the place you’d have weapons,” Invoice says.
This wasn’t only a trivial distinction, he says.
“I used to be stunned to see how excessive they have been. Taking a look at Norway and, and Denmark, you’ve gotten motive to consider that there have been about 50 instances as many weapons accessible among the many Norwegians if measured per capita, so to talk, in comparison with Denmark,” he says.
One issue that may have performed a task on this putting distinction was the provision of iron. Invoice says Norway had far more iron accessible as a uncooked materials than Denmark, so it was simpler to make swords to start with. Nonetheless, there have been nonetheless a LOT extra weapons in Norway.
Does that imply that Norwegian Vikings have been much more violent? Invoice says you may take a look at modern-day society, the place the quantity of handguns in a society is correlated with the quantity of murders in that very same society.
“And you possibly can sort of say that the Viking sword is the handgun of the Viking age, since you couldn’t actually use it for the rest than killing different folks, or threatening to kill them,” he says.
The mixture of those and different puzzle items turned their investigation into one thing larger.
It grew to become greater than a narrative about how folks died, however how communities functioned, how justice was delivered, and what held totally different Viking societies collectively—or pushed them into battle.
